aftermath.

"Raw fries". Salami with black truffles. Tortellini with roasted red pepper and arugula. Stoofperen (stewed pears) with vanilla ice cream.

go time.

My dear old mother has asked that I give some more information about these photos so that she may put some names with some faces.

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Top photo, from left: Alexandra, our comrade from OT301 who's just returned from a long autumn of brain surgeries in Rome; Bani, the Iranian Texan auteur who is a great cook, I've loved all of her food to date; Andy's sister Misri, and Misri's maybe-husband Louie.

The photo directly above these words, from left: Heather and Brodie, (also known as Head and Body), the Canadians who lived here for just long enough for us to get very attached to them and then they cruelly vamoosed themselves back to the frozen tundra. Heather's gigantic noggin is blocking their friend Sandy from view; Isabelle, for whom I did the most humongous website ever; Phil and Kathelijn, our favorite Dutch-Americans; Colin, the calmest man in the world unless you fuck up his shit; then Bani and Mara talking about halal lamb-slaughtering practices, I imagine.

The pictures below are: one of the dozen tiny windup cars Heather brought to play with; Heather doing so, and simultaneously blocking Sandy from view. Come to think of it, did I ever really see this Sandy character that night? Hmm; Etienne (Isabelle and Joost's son), Andy, and Bani doing something with an umbrella and a guitar that I never did really figure out.

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antipasti
prosciutto di parma, finocchiona.
parmigiano-reggiano.
lemon-marinated fennel, mushroom confit.
bruschette with aubergine and mint; with tomato and garlic.

zuppe
minestra maritata (italian wedding soup).
zuppa di zucca (pumpkin soup).

primi
tortelloni di noci al burro e panna.
penne all'arrabbiata.
spaghetti con gamberoni.

secondi
rosemary leg o' lamb.

insalata mista.
yes.

dolci
tiramisu.
strufoli.
amaretto-chocolate cake.

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chewy time.

Both of Mara's dogs in America died this year. Easybeast's long-overdue ship set sail this summer, and Mollybean died peacefully but unexpectedly about 20 minutes ago. The picture below is from March 2004 (Easy, top; Molly, bottom...waiting for chewies). The painting above is from 2004 too.

So R.I.P. Easy (1989-2007), R.I.P. Molly (1994-2007). While we're at it, R.I.P. Otto, R.I.P. Norma, and R.I.P. Sally. R.I.P everybody. May your days be full of unabashed butthole sniffing, long leisurely leashless walks, finally caught squirrels, and plenty of those stinky chewy things you love so much.

everyone needs an engelbewaarder.

Above: Dennis standing in what used to be our CD shop on the Spiegelgracht. It's now a gallery. Below, for comparison's sake, the same view from 2002.

Next, we went to FOAM to see the Weegee exhibit. Not as gory as I thought it would be, and quite a bit funnier than I expected. Nice to see, but ultimately a tad disappointing somehow.

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Then we went to De Engelbewaarder to hear some music. Sean was on tenor, Han on drums, Michael was there and we shot the shit for the first time in a while, and it was a good hang. Fortunately I realized that the beers Jeanie was drinking were tripels and not blondes...otherwise things could've ended badly. The photo above was taken at 16:30, when you could still see the stage. Three hours later, it was like Queen's Day in there: complete engulfment in bodies, beer, and smoke.

We returned home and ordered Thai delivery. Forget everything I ever said about Top Thai; Som Tam is about 36 times better. This is a new find from Mara, and the difference is really remarkable. Great chicken larb, nice beef in penang curry (not pictured), good and spicy shrimp in basil sauce.


















































































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xxxmas.

I took a picture of this spider web at the tram stop. Later in the day I showed it to Mara and she said "was that at the tram stop?" She'd wanted to take a picture of the same spiderweb...

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We're entering the final countdown phase for Xmas dinner. Vital stats: 25 guests, 2 soups, 2 pastas, and we don't really know what else. The Tomanek/Morse crew is handling one soup and one pasta, Andy is doing one soup and one pasta, and everyone else is bringing antipasti and dolci. And we're doing a salad, which I think everyone has forgotten about, including me until just now.

Though the theme is Italian, our team's offerings are distinctly Italian-American. Minestra maritata is much better known in America as Italian Wedding Soup, and apparently it's a regional specialty of Ohio, where Mara's family is from.

We've been calling our pasta a "walnut and pecorino tortelloni in a very garlicky Alfredo sauce." But we actually need to do a little more research to determine if this is really an Alfredo sauce...I don't think that it is. The thing is, it's got lots of garlic and crème fraîche in it, catapulting it kilomteres away from the boring heaviness of most American alfredo sauces.

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saturday night.

From top: St. Feuillien's Cuvée de Noël (Christmas Ale). Raw herring with diced pickles, onions, and peppadew peppers. Father and daughter enjoying some time together in the kitchen. Choucroute garnie. Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream with rhubarb and strawberry compote. Us losing Pictionary again in a last-square showdown. If you can guess what this is supposed to be a drawing of, then you belong on the girls' team.

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Unrelatedly, I think Mara's hit on a repeatable, successful sauerkraut recipe. The secret ingredient? Hard cider instead of white wine or beer.

BTW, my tooth is fine. False alarm.

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chattering, teeth.

Holy jumpin' Jebus, I broke a tooth today, no kidding.

My jaw really started throbbing like hell at De Zotte Thursday night, and Friday morning it was no better. Having seen firsthand what can happen if you postpone your dental care until the weekend, I made it to the dentist an hour before closing on Friday, said "I think I broke a tooth", and yep he found a broken tooth and I got a temporary crown.

Unfortunately? It seems like the broken tooth may not have been the source of my tooth pain, 'cause today it hurts just as bad if not worse. The dentist warned me that it would still hurt today, so I'm not going to panic until the pain reaches Affliction level.

What gives??? Why the health woes???

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Crostini that I made but couldn't chew: prosciutto, gor(gonzola)-mas(carpone), fig preserves; tomato reduction, black olive, mozzarella, red onion; pain d'ardenne, taleggio, chives. Some of these went into the oven for a bit. I tried to eat them normally without success, so I experimented with sucking on them like candy, which was not all that successful or satisfying.

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Below that, nutmeg-enhanced sage and brown butter sauce preparing to meet up with some walnut-pecorino tortelloni. This version of the sauce had a new rustic twist in that it was one-third chicken broth, which made it simultaneously a bit more healthy and more subtle. The tortelloni worked better as lozenges than the crostini had.

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Tonight's Pictionary was the closest Dennis and I have gotten in a long time to beating the ladies (note the red phallus one square behind the powder-blue phallus). We had some tough ones: try to draw "charades", "invade", or "deport" in less than 2 minutes. Well, smoke like 4 joints first, and then try it. See what I'm talking about?

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promise showing.

I know the posts just come and go here like junkies under a highway overpass in an Anthony Kiedis radio ballad, and I apologize. I've got several forces working against me, the majority of them are operating from inside my own body ("The call is coming from inside the house!").

Sickness update: sick. Operating at about 55% power, which is a definite step up from days previous, but still not exactly like being alive. Dennis and I were supposed to go to some sort of manly lunch today while the dames spun off in an artsier direction, but my own coughing ruined my night's sleep and I had to cancel. Bummer, because I was looking forward to seeing what a manly lunch looked like in Amsterdam. In my own manlier days, it used to mean martinis and burgers in a ruby-lit Atlanta cave called the Highland Tap. Here, I was having trouble figuring out where the bad people went to lunch.

As luck would have it, I didn't have to worry about unadulterated manliness because the new schedule hooked us up with the womens down on the Weesperzijde, and that left us with limited options for lunching. We chose the option called De IJsbreker because the other immediate option, Aan de Amstel was way too "mom-ish", not that we don't love moms, because we do, but it just looked too crowded with perky people sitting too close to each other, and none of us really do perky very convincingly.

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We've been to De IJsbreker enough times between the two of us to know what to expect: tasty, interesting sandwiches, comprehensive beverage options, and extremely unreliable service during peak dining times. Fortunately, we were here at 15:00, and things were relaxed and manageable.

After a round of hot chocolate, lunch showed up and everyone's food was unexpectedly delicious. Dennis had an uitsmijter with ham and cheese. Jeanie and Mara both had a very fresh-seeming bowl of snert and they split a pressed foccaccia sandwich with chorizo, blue cheese, and roasted red peppers...this was frankly fantastic, like something from a Spanish Pizza Hut. I had a smoked salmon club sandwich with an excellent horseradish mayonnaise, cucumbers, and a subtle mix of young greenery. Really, it was all just about ideal. And remind me again: why don't all sandwiches have three pieces of bread?

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We then skedaddled to Muntplein to catch David Cronenberg (and Viggo Mortensen)'s nasty new piece of shattered normalcy, Eastern Promises. I thought it was easily the 2nd-best movie I've seen this year up until the last 15 minutes or so, at which point the editing starting showing its seams and I remembered I was watching a movie. But still, the first 90% of the movie is thoroughly captivating, and Cronenberg's new confidence is really something else. It's still probably the 2nd-best movie I've seen this year, go see it.

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The we went to De Zotte for dinner, and it was also totally top-notch as always, including the always-elusive (in our fair city) "service" department. Completely human and pleasant in every way.

Pâté with warm brown bread was received, shall we say, "enthusiastically" by our table, but then this crazy maiskoek contraption came out: two almost crispy cornmeal pancakes, with cheese between them and on top, surrounded by rucola and roasted cherry tomatoes, drizzled with balsamic vinegar. We ate this in about 4 seconds.

Then, perfectly cooked medium-rare steak with a mushroom jus, and a roasted poussin with squash and potato purees, all accompanied by frites and mayo. Oh yeah, and some of the best beers in the known world. Yes....we made it look easy today.

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thyme saver.

"But--I thought you said she had her jaw worked on??? AAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!"...etc, etc. etc.

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I'm self-diagnosing myself as having bronchitis brought on by the flu. But Mark....isn't that absolutely terrible timing??? Yes, thank you for asking, this is bad timing as Mara's parents arrived this morning and last night we had to get through 7 hours of pillow-muffled coughing by me that counted as "sleep".

Since over-the-counter antihistamines aren't good for bronchitis sufferers, I've been exploring other options for re-opening my breathing ports, and one that has worked fantastically is thyme.

Take a big pot, put a couple inches of water in it and 3 or 4 branches of thyme. Bring it to a boil, take it off the stove, drape a towel over the back of your head, and stick your head in the pot. Being careful not to burn your little self, of course. Breathe carefully but as deeply as possible for as long as you can stand it.

Now, would this work just as well with any other aromatic herb? Don't know, haven't tested yet, and hopefully I won't have too many more days left when conditions would be right. But good ol' Wikipedia seems to think that thyme is an especially medicinal herb:

The essential oil of common thyme (Thymus vulgaris) is made up of 20-55% thymol. Thymol, an antiseptic, is the main active ingredient in Listerine mouthwash. Before the advent of modern antibiotics, it was used to medicate bandages. It has also been shown to be effective against the fungus that commonly infects toenails.

A tea made by infusing the herb in water can be used for cough and bronchitis. Medicinally thyme is used for respiratory infections in the form of a tincture, tisane, salve, syrup or by steam inhalation. Because it is antiseptic, thyme boiled in water and cooled is very effective against inflammation of the throat when gargled 3 times a day.

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So you can gargle with your vaporizer water when it cools, huh? Sometimes Wikipedia sounds like a doddering old aunt that nobody believes anymore.

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The rest of this post used to contain a scratchpad for figuring out where we would be eating with Mara's parents, but that has been relocated for reprocessing. Really.

nurse! report to the kitchen, stat.

Sorry for all the completely crappy flash-lit pictures around here these days, but the sun is setting at 4pm or so, and well...most of our photo taking is done after that. Plus, we're sick, and photographing food seems like a tremendous waste of precious energy resources.

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Considering that it had been a few months since anyone had been seriously injured around here, we should've guessed that Nurse Morse was due to make an appearance.

Actually Nurse Morse knew that his services would be required ahead of time, because this month's health crisis is a "do-over" of a previous month's health crisis: Mara's jaw explosion. She just had her jaw "de-grossified" (a technical term, don't worry about it) at the OLVG again on Thursday, and so now she is the lucky winner of a two- or three- day trip to Codeineland.

Normally, an event like this causes the bulbous red phone on Nurse Morse's spotless desk to emit a high-pitched shriek of alarm, which then causes Nurse Morse to hurl himself into 7 kinds of caretaking action. Unfortunately, Nurse Morse seems to have a touch of the flu, or of something similar that makes him feel as if his head is made entirely of styrofoam plus his throat is very scratchy.

So we are making beef stew tonight, because we think it will make us feel better. We're using our own recipe from earlier this year, but maybe we'll soon talk about Julia's recipe that we never did make.

Pictured above, a Spanish tortilla I made yesterday, sitting on top of the José Andrés cookbook that taught me the magical pan-flipping technique required to make one. This one contains leeks, mushrooms, potatoes, and manchego, and it's completely delicious.

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when life hands you lemons.

Let's see: you combine a couple of debauched nights in a row with colder temperatures outside and I'm pretty sure that's a recipe for comfort food. Or a recipe for a state of need that can potentially be ameliorated by comfort food.

Luckily, MT and I had the same idea about what would be comforting last night: red sauce. And ravioli. Unluckily, I didn't remember that Albert Heijn's Excellent spinach and ricotta ravioli contain an excellent amount of lemon zest, and so they're not the most excellent pairing with red sauce. At all. I won't forget again.

So, luckily, I'd also bought some of their "4-cheese" raviolis just in case, and these met the criteria for achievement of moderate comfort.

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all right now.

It's that time of year, when the plethora of get-togethers and other holiday merrymaking starts to pile up on itself. This week we had to make some hard decisions about what to do with our time: would it be a trip to the Ardennes for a few days to get in some walking and cooking with old friends; would it be a brief dash down to southwestern France to take part in a decadent blogfest; or would we play it safe and just go to the 100-year anniversary party for the Villa?

We ended up doing the responsible thing and staying here. Which was great because I got to eat Emma's Ethiopian cooking, which is amazing, no doubt because she's been taught by actual Ethiopians. She really outdid herself this time, it seemed like there were at least 10 different things that you could mix and match with your injera, and they were all super. I have no good pictures at all of the food, so you'll have to settle for shots of the kitchen post-dinner and of Tsehaytu and Getatchew providing the evening's entertainment.

tak kenal maka, tak sayang.

Regular readers of this nonsense will remember that I have been "into" Indonesian food for a number of years now, that number being, say...5. I mean, I'd tasted it in America a couple of times but it was either in people's homes or in faraway places. It wasn't until we got here that I had enough potent doses for the addiction to take root.

After I was hooked, I began my hunt for a high-quality, well-written, modern, authentic Indonesian/Malaysian cookbook. In English. With pictures. This is no trivial set of requirements it seems, cos nothing out there fit the bill. The Sri Owen books seemed OK in many respects, but there were no photos. And since I only know what about 6 or 8 Indonesian dishes are supposed to look like, I needed a bit more guidance for the rest.

The point to all this is, I'd been searching/waiting/thinking about writing one for some time before I found Cradle of Flavor. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good. The recipes themselves are extremely thorough and clearly written, and though they usually include quite a bit too much detail, that detail can come in handy if your mind's not 100% committed to cooking that day. The stories behind the recipes and the author's travels in general do an elegant job of tying everything together into a very personal whole.

I've been working my way through it via a pretty non-standard approach. I've been cooking the things nobody else had claimed yet on the Cooking With Cradle of Flavor thread, so I haven't even really gotten around to cooking any of the sure-fire winners like rendang yet.

I guess it's not hugely surprising to see what the last things to be chosen are: recipes featuring exotic ingredients like oxtail or black glutinous rice; also those involving "messy" techniques like deep frying or unusual (for the Western cook) preparations such as whole fish.

The biggest surprise so far is how really easy all of the recipes have been. Some of them are barely even recipes...the Garlic-Marinated Tempeh (tempe goreng) from a while back is basically just cutting up tempeh, soaking it in some water, and then frying it. Today I'm making Pan-Seared Tamarind Tuna (tuna goreng), and it's really just tuna marinated in tamarind paste and then sauteed in peanut oil.

I mean, it's not all quite that simple. There are plenty of recipes with medium-size ingredient lists (10 or more), and many of those recipes utilize more than one cooking technique to deliver depth of flavor, which is apparently a very Indonesian thing to do. For example, Twice-Cooked Tofu with Coriander (tahu goreng bacem) took some time because you first make a marinade for the tofu, reduce it completely with the tofu in the pan, and then deep-fry the tofu after that.

















As I mentioned, I haven't made too many recipes that would be my first choices thus far, but due to a shrimp-defrosting snafu, I had to make Stir-fried Shrimp Sambal with very little warning, and that is something that my little meal-planning sniper would have in its sights. It's a simple preparation (shallots, candlenuts, garlic, palm sugar, shrimp paste, and chiles) that's extremely delicious.

turn this thing around.

In happier news, Mara made a stellar choucroute garnie for dinner tonight (potatoes not pictured). It was exactly what we needed.

wheel me out.

Kids can be so cruel, can't they.

Pictured above are just some of the people who contributed to my having hands-down the worst DJ experience of my life this Saturday from 10pm to 6:30am. The problem? Utter tastelessness, theirs. A problem compounded by the fact that one of the organizers of the party had invited 3 DJs with impeccable taste to provide the evening's entertainment. Do you see the potential for conflict here? It was like hiring a dentist to fix your plumbing, and just about as successful.

Luckily, we were able to avoid what I'm sure would've been an absolutely hilarious riot (wherein 3 manly but badly costumed hip-hop DJs are chased through the Amsterdam canal belts by a livid throng of willow-limbed, mascara-wearing electro house devotees) because there was another DJ attending the party undercover (or possibly dressed as a DJ), and he just happened to have 5 hours' worth of brainless electro house CDs with him, so we wisely let him take over, and the crowd loved every vapid second of it.

Here he is, working his magical boringness generator. Note the hand gesture that he is using to notify the crowd that something extremely exciting is going to happen in the music, a gesture that is completely necessary, because otherwise it would just seem like he was playing the same monotonous chunk of sterilized robot dung for 3 hours:

















Musical tastes aside, he was a very nice guy and competent DJ and his offer to bail us out really did avert some sort of ugly showdown.

It was also a "Dress Up from the Neck Up" party, designed to encourage costumization by reducing the number of participating body parts to one, your head. This photo below was taken at around 5am or so, after I'd ditched most of my head costume in protest of the hugely unpleasant crowd (the goatee and hat are the remaining parts of the costume). My homie next to me, however, my co-DJ, could not ditch his costume because he shaved his perfectly full head of hair off in order to to emulate male pattern baldness. That's hardcore.

ETA: I'm not exactly sure what James is dressed as on the left. He pretty much always looks like that: cigarette, red wine stain, supplicant pose.

cradle of winter.

Fuck, dude. I am not in Arizona anymore. It is being made perfectly clear to me that Amsterdam and Phoenix do not share the same ideas about what December weather should be like.

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The "Cooking with Cradle of Flavor" project is drawing to a close, or at least almost all of the recipes in the book have been cooked at least once. Tonight I'll be doing my part by making shrimp sate. Wikipedia's sate page is actually pretty informative if you have blanks that need filling...the blanks that our stomachs currently are will be filled after a few hours of shrimp marination.

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Here's the thing. We don't cook rice anymore, we cook bulgur. We started cooking it when Dr. Moep had her thyroid meltdown back in '02, you know, for nutritional reasons (whole grain, high fiber, high protein + a quick cooking time). But then we just started liking it more than rice, and, well...rice never really tried all that hard to win us back.

Below is the completed Shrimp Sate from Cradle of Flavor. The flavors were excellent, but we really should've made something else as well b/c there wasn't a sufficient amount of sauce to juice up our "rice". I ended up reducing the marinade a little and thinning with coconut milk, which worked out just fine.

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abused substances.

As a person matures, they will often go through what psychologists term an "experimental phase", where they ingest an array of dubious foreign substances and see if anything interesting happens.

Do psychologists really even think about this stuff anymore? Probably not, and if they do, they surely don't call it an "experimental phase", that's hardly technical-sounding enough. Who knows. Regardless, we here at Vegetarian Duck have been through several of these phases ourselves, and trust me: they can go either way, depending on the substances involved. This time, we're hitting the hard stuff. That's right, processed vegetarian entrees.

Tonight's dose? Cutting edge lab shit, baby...street name: Q.

You thought I kicked that shit? I thought so too. Mostly we had ourselves a scarcity problem...availability dried up, no one was holding, not Albert H., not nobody. Tonight, though, I got my hands on some Quorn Cordon Bleu, but it was weak. It was like the time when you were 13 and you bought that "weed" from a friend's older brother. When you smoked it? Not much happened. You know why? It wasn't weed. It was oregano or catnip or carpet fibers or whatever that bastard of a friend's older brother (correctly) thought he could get away with selling you.

This was kind of like that. Not much happened. It wasn't much like food: no juiciness, not much taste other than salt, not much notable texture other than a dry crumby exterior and a tasteless gooey cheese simulation inside.

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Speaking of weed, my month in Arizona reminded me that perhaps marijuana is best enjoyed as a more occasional recreation. Compared to, say, using it to meet the FDA's recommended daily consumption of "leafy greens".

This previous sentence, by the way, illustrates a grammatical point that has been bothering me for some time now without my getting to the bottom of it.

Until now, that is! Basically, I was wondering exactly when and how I became confused about what to do with periods and quotation marks. I'm sure it's not obvious from my writing, but at some point I did know quite a bit about the English language and how to write it properly.

The problem boils down to the logical placement of punctuation marks within or outside of quotation marks. After some research, I'm happy to report that there's a good reason I've been unsure: Americans and Brits do it differently (one helpful explanation here).

Apparently it works like this: everyone agrees that if you're not using a period at the end of a sentence, then the placement of the punctuation mark should reflect the intent of the sentence.

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He said to me, "Did you call me a knob shiner?"
I thought to myself: only because MF Doom showed me how to rhyme it with "Rob Reiner"!

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If you are using a period at the end of a sentence, then according to the Americans, the period goes inside the quotation marks, regardless of the meaning of the sentence.

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Sweating nervously, I decided that my only course of action was to press the little red button labeled "Destroy."

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See? The little red button doesn't actually have a period on it, but that's what this sentence implies. The Brits, on the other hand, would put the period outside the quotes, because, well, that's what is actually on the the little red button: "Destroy".

And since this makes more sense to my tiny tiny mind, I started doing it without realizing it. That is, until I found myself stymied at the ends of sentences wondering why I wasn't sure where the period went. I assumed it was just my daily intake of leafy greens that was fucking me up, but no, it's just the Brits again.

Lastly, in annotating the excerpted lyrics below, I came across a term that I hadn't heard for describing a phenomenon that I find simultaneously depressing and fascinating: pseudo-anglicism (though the example I was annotating was actually an example of pseudo-Spanish).

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V. Vaughn, the traveling Vaudeville Villain
Who don't give a flying fuck who ain't not feeling him
Watch what ya' dealing him: ace, king, death card
Strong-arm the wrong man, pardon the left guard

Get money and earn it, then everything you touch turns shit
Got much to learn kid, light it up, burn shit
Light it up like a Dutch when the hash melt
Only time they see him is when they need him with the cash belt

Ay carumba, now that's my number
One dry summer, as far as I remember
Burnt out, but gaining every edgy penny
Then he hit him straight to the head like Reggie Denny
Call him back when you need some more 'gnac, Horshack
Doing 80 down the Van Wyck on horseback
Yr man's sick but he wreck tracks, puto
Get back too bro', exactamundo

Viktor the director flip a script like Rob Reiner
The way a lotta dudes rhyme their name should be "knob shiner"
For a buck, they'd likely dance a jig or do the Hucklebuck
To Vik it's no big deal, they're just a buncha knuckle-fucks.

-MF Doom as Viktor Vaughn, "Vaudeville Villain"



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two minds beaten as one.

It's pretty difficult to keep your vacation with you after you're done with the physically being there part, isn't it. I'm trying quasi-desperately to maintain my zen Phoenix mindset here in Amsterdam but it's proving more arduous than I expected. What I want to have happen is that I can project myself right into my seat at the Huge Marble Square in the Phoenix kitchen, where I am at rest, my mind is calm, the world is my oyster, the TV is large, the refrigerator is full of lemon Propel, etc.

I'm obviously doing something wrong (other than not quite being on the correct sleeping/waking schedule for this time zone), 'cause it ain't quite working: our TV is still small. Maybe a picture of the last burrito I tasted in Phoenix will help. This is a Burrito Mexicano from Baja Fresh, a chain of California-style healthy Mexican fast food-ish joints. They used to be owned by Wendy's, but I guess that didn't work out, b/c they're independent again.

My parents like Baja Fresh because it's close-by, fresh-seeming (imagine that), and healthy-seeming. I found it to be not especially healthy (though it's true there wasn't much cheese, ground beef, or sour cream involved), and eh, ok in the taste department. My burrito was pretty much chicken, black beans, and rice. There were three salsas, and the more of them I applied, the better the burrito got, no surprises there. I guess I'm saying: I didn't understand what all the fuss was about, this was pretty average food, fresh for sure, but it contained approximately 1/20th the taste of Richardson's New Mexican Platter.

Maybe the best thing about Baja Fresh was that they provide nutritional info, not so common for Mexican places. The burrito pictured above? 790 calories, but almost no fat. I only ate half.

the persistence of laggery.

You know what, I suspected something like this was up, don't know why. Our best Vegetarian Duck wishes go out to Mr. Broiler, may his weight loss equal his amount of nutrition knowledge in ways that ours hasn't yet.

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The jet lag, it's bad. It's my own fault to some degree, I did fine the first night home, up early in the morning, hit the gym, etc. But that dang Circle show, while excellent, has thrown my loop off by a beat or two for the past two nights, not getting to sleep until 7am or so.

One of these nights I cooked for the first time since I've been back, and made something alright. You know we're always looking for fish recipes that complement our variety of inexpensive frozen fish available across the street, and that are subtly tweakable enough to use on a very regular basis.

One variety that has been unexplored until now is the frozen tuna filet, primarily because it's so inexpensive that I assumed it wasn't any good. After trying it, I'm not saying that I'm going to be serving it sashimi-style anytime soon, but it was completely doable as a fully cooked piece of fish.

I was inspired by a brandade recipe for the flavors, but there are no purees anywhere in the presentation. The potatoes are (or should have been) mandoline-cut and they provide the non-stick underneath layer for the fish to bake upon. Everything is pretty well-lubricated with an infused olive oil (1/2 cup olive oil, 10 minute simmer with a thyme branch, 2 garlic cloves, and 2 bay leaves). After the baking, drizzle with minced capers and a tart and nutty brown butter/balsamic sauce (not pictured). It sounds a little bit like overkill, but like I said, the fish itself is not amazing, so a little flav-o-rizing is just what you need.